


Woad Warriors

by Vulgarweed



Series: Neither Side Created Kink Memes [2]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Historical Reconstructionism Kink, Kilts, M/M, Woad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-16
Updated: 2012-06-16
Packaged: 2017-11-07 20:55:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgarweed/pseuds/Vulgarweed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wensleydale looks very sexy while wearing his nerdy hobby, and Brian wants to point out some aspects he might have missed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Woad Warriors

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** Wensleydale/Brian  
>  Wensleydale's calling the shots and wearing a kilt.
> 
> October, 2008

Wensleydale may have always seemed to have been about 42 years old…but there was something in him that seemed even older, and that possibly predisposed him to this geekiest of hobbies.

And while Brian may have harboured fantasies of sweaty warfare, what the secular-religion of historical re-enactment societies did for Wensleydale was the perfection to a spiritual level of his greatest talent: nit-picking.

Every fiber of anachronistic fabric, every improperly forged weapon, every furtive nipping of a dose of tobacco in pre-New World milieus or swig of spirits produced by modern brewing methods earned a look of aristocratic disdain that might have meant someone’s head if this weren’t actually make-believe.

Brian grew to admire that disdain, even crave it. He walked a fine line now between courting that glance as often as he could (to tuck away for future private enjoyment, examining of the debauched possibilities under scratchy sheets in the wool-scented encampment of the Highland regiments). He began to look on glaring historical inaccuracies with an erotic charge. He smuggled a grungy laptop into the camp to watch _Braveheart_ over and over. He read Sir Walter Scott. He insisted his family had its own tartan. He quoted _Highlander_ at every opportunity, and made his own opportunities to burst into “The Skye Boat Song” or, should that fail to get a reaction, tunes from _Brigadoon._

And then he found his true calling when he spoke with a dyemaker.

What few modern people understand about woad is that it _stinks._ In its traditional processing, the plant itself gives off an odor like stale socks and dead sheep, festering in the sun in a blighted cabbage patch and nurtured with the flesh of dead sea things washed up on the beach. It can drop a herd of swine at thirty paces. And it must be mixed with ammonia--not the modern chemical housecleaner, but the natural element found in urine. Brian relished the whole process, burying his hands in the stink and staining his clothes and his hair and his face.

“The Picts did not use woad as body paint, that’s a myth,” sneered Wensleydale, with a very not-period wooden clothespin on his nose.

“How do you know?” said Brian cheerfully, moving close, eager to leave mucky blueish handprints on that very anachronistically clean white skin showing beneath the folds of the great kilt. (Circa 1692, around the time of the Glencoe Massacre).

“It doesn’t cling properly to the skin,” said Wensleydale, ignoring evidence of the opposite all over Brian.

“It does if you add lard,” Brian grinned. “Which I did.”

“Yes,” said Wensleydale, “a texture as pleasant as the scent, no doubt.”

“Aw, c’mon now,” said Brian. “Are you telling me Bonnie Prince Charlie’s boys are more poncy than the Picts? Too soft for a little pig fat ‘at smells of the battlefield?”

“Bonnie Prince Charlie? Off by 50 years!” Wensleydale shouted. “I fail to see how such a flagrant display of primitivism can possibly enhance morale, much less accuracy…”

Brian was, frankly, boggled. How could he not see? If you were going to play-act at war, wasn’t the whole joy of it the squelch and the stench? Mud and blood and horse dung and vulture breath?

Well. Maybe that wasn’t what motivated Wensleydale. 

“You really don’t see it, do you?” said Brian with a grin.

“I don’t,” said Wensleydale, crossing his arms stubbornly as the drape of his great kilt brooded on one shoulder and a damp breeze ruffled the marten fur of his sporran. “Show me.”

Something about the pristine lad all puzzled and stern beneath a storm-grey sky made Brian want to push his luck. To wear the woad one had to be wild, or at the very least riled, and he gazed at the crisp white leggings, the only slightly pinker glimpse of knee beneath the tartan, and just wanted to push his luck all the further. And a glance at the _sgian dubh,_ no doubt immaculately sharp and polished, gave him the very opposite of a prudent pause. That was Wensleydale to a T right there – sharp and shiny and clean and precise and purely ceremonial. Never tasted blood.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to convince me,” said Wensleydale, in a rather clipped tone.

Brian rose up from the vat, stinking woad flying from his arms and mud flying from his shoes and knees. He practiced his idea of a wild war whoop while ripping off his t-shirt, skin goosebumping in the damp before he started to anoint his belly with blue grease in the closest he could approximate to very vaguely Pictish spirals and angles.

Wensleydale’s disdain slipped. Just a little, just for a second, but it inspired Brian to greater heights. He picked up a long stick and brandished it, spearlike.

“You need more, I think,” said Wensleydale, maintaining his damnable critical faculties. “Around your chest.”

“All right then,” said Brian, drawing bastardized tribal eyes around his nipples.

Wensleydale licked his lips.

“And your face.”

“I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“You can’t expect me to touch that.”

“Oh, but I can,” said Brian, challenging. He picked up the “spear” again.

“Not yet,” said Wensleydale, tapping his toe, fidgeting with his sporran.

Brian was thinking that he had to be going regimental. Wensleydale would never wear anything so historically inaccurate as underpants.

“Brian, I am hardly an expert, that’s not my period of choice, but I was under the impression that the Picts had not yet invented the dungarees.”

“Dungarees? No one’s called them that in fifty years.”

“And no one wore them when fighting Romans.”

“Very well, then,” said Brian, stripping off, and being satisfied by Wensleydale’s look of shock when he revealed that he didn’t wear underpants either. _Hygienically_ inaccurate. Continuing to enjoy that look, and enjoying it more the further down it went, Brian began trailing his fingers down his belly and hips and up his thighs, drawing patterns meant to draw the gaze, finally settling at last into a daring pull upon his cock, which was growing long enough to accommodate some fairly elaborate spirals, which were immediately after blurred by the tantalizing motion of his hand, smearing blue blue blue everywhere, and it was all Wensleydale saw.

“It’s warming,” he taunted. “You should try it.”

“Don’t touch me,” said Wensleydale, trembling, horrified and attracted.

“Would I scare you now in battle?”

“Yes,” said Wensleydale, his voice a high squeak. He caught himself quickly, and deepened his voice forcefully. “I challenge you…to a feat of skill!”

“Caber toss?” leered Brian, even his teeth now looking blue. “Without hands?”

Wensleydale swallowed hard, rocking on his heels, kilt now noticeably tented beneath the fur…”Promise you won’t get any on me!”

“I promise,” Brian lied.

“Then kneel.”

Brian did, wondering where the knighting ceremony came into it. Wensleydale lifted wool and blessed him with a sword.


End file.
